


Walls of Fire, Wings of Dust

by KrisLaughs



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-07
Updated: 2011-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:11:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrisLaughs/pseuds/KrisLaughs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex didn’t mean to get involved, didn’t mean to get attached, didn’t mean to be left with nothing at all. Sometimes Freedom isn't exactly what he expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walls of Fire, Wings of Dust

**Author's Note:**

> This is not my fault! It was the stomach-brush scene in the movie. I just filled in a few little gaps. I wanted it to be happy, I really did, but it turned out the way it was going to anyway. Character death is from the movie.

His whitewashed room at the compound is probably only ten by twelve, but even with blackout shades pulled tight over the two large windows, the space feels just this side of palatial. Alex paces it back and forth a couple of times, places his hands on the walls and leans into them, feeling plaster like dust and putty under his fingers. _Not strong enough_ , is his first thought. Not if anything goes wrong. For a moment, his breath hitches in his throat, and he curses himself silently for agreeing to come here at all.

“Dude,” comes a muffled voice through the too-thin drywall. “You here because you sleepwalk or are you part caged-tiger or something?”

Alex clears his throat. Sometimes he forgets what it’s like to just talk to someone, what it’s like for them to be able to respond. So many of his conversations the last few months have consisted of guards offering a meal, grunt of thanks in reply. Or else they only exist between himself and the cold, steel walls.

“Sorry,” he mutters. Sometimes freedom isn’t quite what he expected it to be.

Several minutes later, he hears the sound of a door opening, footsteps shuffling to his room, soft knocking on his door. He opens it and peers into the darkened hall.

Armando is standing there in what appears to be a standard-issue CIA bathrobe and black shorts that defy shape or style. He supposes he doesn’t look much better, wearing a plain white tee and the first set of boxers (red, with some kind of print) that he found in the first store Charles and Erik brought him to after securing his release.

“So you’re the new guy,” Armando says.

And, yeah, he figured that much was obvious when they were introduced this afternoon. “So you’re the cabbie,” he replies.

To his surprise, the guy just laughs and tips his imaginary cap. “Mind if I come in?” he asks. “S’not that easy to fall asleep with armed guards outside the windows—“

“You’d be surprised.”

“—and I figured you were awake anyhow. Huh?” He tilts his head and stares at Alex for another moment. “Oh, right, I heard you’d been in the joint.”

“What else you hear?” Alex waves his guest to the only chair in the room. He sits heavily on the bed, stares at his feet.

Armando shrugs. The silence presses in on them. Finally he says, “that you requested solitary. That it took more than a mountain of paperwork and signatures from some pretty high places to bust you out.”

Alex only nods. Armando keeps the conversation going for a minute or two before Alex interrupts. “You didn’t ask,” he says, trying not to sound too surprised.

“Ask what?”

“What I did to get in there.”

Armando considers him for a long moment. Somewhere a clock ticks in the background and he’s pretty sure that outside, he can hear crickets chirping as he looks anywhere but at Armando’s stare. “I figure that guy Xavier knows what he’s doing, and I figure he wouldn’t’ve sprung you out if whatever you did was malicious. Or intentional. Or something you could even control. So, I guess, what point is there to know what it was.”

Alex shrugs. _I could kill you, too_ is the point, he thinks, but he bites his lip and doesn’t say anything more about it.

They talk for a while longer, and the moon rises overhead. Finally, Alex stretches out on the bed—maybe the first he’s really been able to stretch out on since the night he’d really rather forget—and his eyelids get heavier as his conversational skills slip into the welcoming void.

When he wakes up the next morning, the door is closed. He doesn’t remember when Armando left.

~

Armando comes to his room every night that week, and they shoot the shit about nothing much in particular—hockey and basketball, secret government agencies and the newest mutants to arrive at the compound—until Alex drifts off to sleep mid-conversation. Every night. He has no idea when Armando leaves. He hasn’t slept this well in a very long time.

Though he suspects he’s not going to be able to drift off after taking the torso off that damn ugly statue in the courtyard.

Maybe it’s the disappointed looks on Charles’ and Erik’s faces. Maybe it’s the fear and awe of the others after he told them to look away for his demonstration. Or maybe it’s just the after-high, adrenaline rush he gets every time he lets himself go. Using his powers leaves him both exhilarated and drained of energy, limbs heavy like they’ll never recharge and heart pounding like it’ll never stop.

He paces the room until Armando, _Darwin_ , he reminds himself, finally knocks.

He’s probably too quick to jump-to and get the door. His cheeks feel flushed. “Hey,” he says, trying to play cool.

“Hey.” Darwin just stares at him for a moment, then runs his hand through his long, curly hair. “That was something back there, man,” he says, and there’s something in his face that Alex hasn’t seen before.

Alex’s smile wavers.

“What?” Armando—Darwin--asks.

“It scared you,” he says quietly, surprised he can get the words out through the tightness in his jaw. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d scared someone, everyone, away. He tries not to remember the look of horror on his mother’s face, the smell of charred plaster thick in his lungs, his knees shaking as she called the cops to take him away. Somehow, he thought things would be different here.

“Nah, man.” Darwin claps Alex on the shoulder, leaves his hand there a moment longer than necessary, and Alex doesn’t know who he’s trying harder to reassure.

He raises an eyebrow.

“I mean, not that it wasn’t badass. But you gotta remember who you’re talking to.” Darwin flashes steel, or concrete, or lava across his skin, gone almost as soon as Alex registers it was there. “We ain’t an easy group to frighten away.”

~

The first time they kiss, Alex feels something red-hot flare in his chest. He pulls away, panting, throwing himself back until he hits a solid wall.

“—can’t,” is all he manages to say between deep, steadying pulls of air.

But Darwin is there, closing the space between them, resting his hand on the center of Alex’s bare chest, staring openly at the bulge in his shorts. “Damn, that’s hot,” he says, laughing at his own joke, as the skin touching Alex cools suddenly, like rocky fingers of a glacier. The dense-packed ice spreads up his arm, drawing sparks from Alex’s core.

“Look, I can’t, okay?” Alex manages to push him away, and maybe he’s a little too rough but for the moment, he doesn’t really care. “Bad things happen.”

“Bad things happen anyway, kiddo.” Darwin isn’t smiling anymore. “So you might as well enjoy what you got, and—just shut up for a second—I may not be as smart as the guys running this circus, but I know we got something here.”

Alex folds his arms across his chest.

“Havok. It’s a good name, you know. You may be silent as the grave, but you know just how to tear a guy apart inside. How you hold all that shit in you anyway?”

Alex shrugs.

“Alright, when you’re ready to talk, or whatever else, you know where to find me.” He closes the door without a backwards glance.

Alex--Havok, he reminds himself—barely sleeps all night.

~

He thinks they’re being discreet, though with Xavier and Erik halfway around the world, he’s not sure that it matters. A light brush of his shoulders in the hall, a shared laugh over a meal is all it takes for Alex’s blood to pool deep in his gut, then lower, then with a knowing look, they slip away from the group, opposite directions, excuses made. He’s never kissed a dude before, never really kissed anyone before, but Darwin is patient, calm as a boulder on a windblown hilltop. He holds Alex’s shoulders and pulls him close, fingers digging almost painfully into his skin. His breath is warm and cool and smells of city lights and faraway places.

Alex cranes his neck to nibble the edge of Armando’s jaw, savoring every moan and shiver as he works his mouth around Darwin’s earlobe and towards his waiting tongue.

He thinks they’re being discreet until, sneaking out of Darwin’s room in the dark after the moon has set, he bumps into Raven.

“I think you’ve got a little… evolution on your cheek,” she whispers, giggling softly. “Just there.” But her smile is good-natured, and it’s a moment before his blush fades enough he realizes she’s standing there, naked and blue.

“Where’re you going this time of night?” he asks, rubbing his face furiously.

She grins mysteriously, her yellow-feral eyes sparkle in the darkness. “You boys don’t think you’ve got the market cornered on fun.” She taps the side of her nose and winks, disappearing around the corner and into the dark.

~

The first time Armando makes him come, he feels the wave of heat a moment before it hits. “You have to,” he pants, “Stop.”

He feels the edge of Darwin’s smile curve around his cock. He pulls away, each movement exquisite, leaving him straining for more while the parts of his brain that haven’t gone completely to mush scream this has to end now.

Over the pounding of his heart and the crest of energy building inside him, he hears Darwin’s voice, peaceful and low.

“—Can’t hurt me,” he says, and the ebony skin of Darwin’s back, the hands holding Alex’s hips, morph to a gunmetal grey.

Like a turtle he’s protected on the outside, but the mouth he closes around Alex’s throbbing head is dangerously gentle and soft, and _fuck it_ , Alex thinks, finally giving in to Darwin’s apparent death wish, to the momentum and heat inside him, to everything. His hips thrust forward and his back arches so far he wonders if he’s gonna break. A burst of energy escapes his skin, white hot, red flame, with the devastating beauty of a firework in the face.

He barely registers the flush over Darwin’s not-back as it absorbs the impact, glowing briefly, before Alex’s toes uncurl and relief wells up fast enough to drown his fluttering heart.

Spent, Alex falls back on the bed. Darwin collapses beside him, adaptation fading into his entirely human body of knobbly knees and sweat-slicked skin, lead-hard shell flaking away in whispers of oxidized metal and dust.

“That was,” Alex exhales.

“Yeah,” is Armando’s only reply.

~

The last time Darwin touches him, he’s standing in front of the pinball table and, holy shit, when did pinball become a metaphor for sex? There’s something in the air, distant sounds out of place, banging of concrete and metal, and the whoosh of air that makes him think of lighting trash cans on fire as a kid.

Darwin’s hand rough-scrapes across his belly, and the nervous energy he feels building inside him finds purpose. They can do this. They can take whatever’s come. They’re a team.

Hell, as they communicate in a flurry of wordless glances that he’s sure the Professor would be more than proud of, Alex even thinks they’re pretty smart. He thinks that right up until the moment Sebastian Shaw catches his hat trick of red light between impossibly-moving, long-fingered hands. It’s the first time Alex has done this with the intent to hurt (to kill), and Shaw just stares at him, _smiling_.

Alex doesn’t feel smart anymore.

~

 _You can’t hurt me_ echoes in his ears as Darwin stares at him, skin melting, oxidizing, splitting with the fire, Alex’s fire, inside him. _How you hold all that shit in you, anyway?_

He wishes he knew.

And he’s using every ounce of concentration he has to keep it there, to keep it from blowing apart the rest of this compound; since that crazy motherfucker Shaw, or whatever lame-ass name he goes by, is gone, it won’t do any good to supercharge the place now.

It’s only the shocked silence of the others, of Raven and Sean and Hank, as they stand beside him watching Darwin burn, that hold him together as sparks flare in the corners of his vision, fire and fear and grief threaten to tear him apart.

~

“These are for you,” Xavier says quietly, holding out a nondescript, sealed box. “Director McCone sent the ashes down this morning. It took some time to find the messenger, as we couldn’t exactly have anyone showing up here. This is all they could find of him. I thought you would want to know.”

“How did you—“ Havok starts to ask, then he remembers who he’s talking to.

Xavier turns his chair slowly to look out over the grounds. “Raven told me,” he says.

“Does he have family?” Alex wonders aloud, realizing he never thought to ask. He adds it to an ever-growing list of regrets.

“Just us,” Xavier replies.

Alex takes the box, marveling that so much life can be reduced to so little dust. _Dust_. He remembers, suddenly, the oxidized grit across his bedroom floor, spiraling in little eddies off Armando’s back. Darwin adapts, that’s what he _does_ , Alex realizes, staring at the box like it’s going to start speaking to him, like it’s going to turn back into his friend. What better way to adapt to burning up than become something that no longer burns?

“I’m so sorry.” Charles rests a hand on Alex’s arm. “I feel no consciousness inside there.” And the thing is, that Alex knows, with the certainty of someone who can lay his deepest secrets bare, that Charles really is.

“Oh.” Alex feels the little spark of hope fizzle and die. Suddenly he doesn’t care what happens to the ashes. They aren’t Darwin. They aren’t even a memory. He tears open the packaging, ignoring the paper cut that blossoms a few tiny drops of blood, rose-petal red, walks over to the balcony rail, and unceremoniously dumps it over the side.

His cheeks are flushed and he can feel the familiar, terrifying pressure build within his chest. He’s walking with purpose and no idea where he’s headed until the bunker stairs appear in front of him. He doesn’t meet Charles’ eyes as he walks away. He doesn’t look back.

He doesn’t see the ashes coalesce on a breeze to form fine feathers, ash-grey and black over hollow-light bone, catch an updraft, and disappear into the sun.


End file.
